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Weekly News from the President – Community Media on the Beach at ACM West

Posted onOctober 27, 2014

I was lucky enough to visit the Alliance for Community Media West Region conference in Ventura, California this past week. It was a great opportunity to talk with ACM members about their work in the Western states (Hawaii, California, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico), to meet with vendors, and to provide some updates about what we are monitoring and working on in Washington DC in the next six months.

During the conference, we gathered ACM volunteers to work on pushing forward with legislation in Congress based on the work of AJR 39, the California legislation that this year called on the federal government to allow flexibility for PEG fees to be spent on capital or operating costs.

If you’d like to be involved in this effort to help PEG operations in California and others states, please let me know by emailing me at mwassenaar@allcommunitymedia.org

The biggest treat for me was talking with people who are new to the field or working on start-ups (or reinventing) PEG operations in their community. The West Region is home to recent reinventions of public access television like CMAC in Fresno and PADNET in Long Beach. I met the people behind start-ups in Oxnard in Southern California, and Chico and Redding in the far North, and talked with people from operations big and small.

It was actually pretty inspiring to talk with Cheryl Noble from Nevada City, CA about what she and other volunteers are trying to do to reinvigorate community media in their small town. And it was eye-opening to talk with Debra Lucero in Shasta about her work bringing community arts councils into the management of community television.

All in all, it was an invigorating couple of days…and the fish tacos were pretty good too!